Small businesses will soon be able to take advantage of the same online shopping infrastructure used by Instagram and Facebook as PayPal has announced that it is rolling out a new ecommerce platform.
The new platform will combine exiting parts of the company's payments business such as allowing merchants to accept money online and shoppers to check out through PayPal. However, small businesses will also get access to PayPal's backend systems like fraud protection, compliance and authenticating an account.
Small startups would have difficulties building these systems by themselves due to the cost which is why the company is opening up its e-commerce platform to small businesses.
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Currently both Instagram Checkout and Facebook Marketplace are already running on PayPal's platform and small businesses will soon be able to leverage the same backend tools and services.
PayPal's expansion
PayPal's business is already comprised of partners and online marketplaces and the company has expanded well beyond online checkout since being spun off from eBay in 2015.
During its last earnings call, the company's COO Bill Ready said PayPal's top 20 marketplaces grew by 40 percent year over year and almost reached $90bn in volume last year alone.
The new commerce platform will also include other backend processes such as onboarding, payouts and disputes management, AI and machine learning-powered fraud protection.
Ready explained why PayPal decided to open up its ecommerce platform to small businesses, saying:
“We are bringing our vision of open commerce and partnership to life with the PayPal Commerce Platform – to power commerce in a way that allows more businesses and more people to participate in the benefits of the digital economy. When I think about the world I want to wake up to in a decade, I don’t want there to be only one place to buy online. I want to wake up in a world where there is a thriving, vibrant, and diverse ecosystem of merchants, sellers, entrepreneurs and businesses of all sizes. We want to help more businesses get started, grow and thrive in today’s complex digital world.”
PayPal's ecommerce platform will be available first across the US, UK and Europe but the company plans to eventually expand to all other markets where it operates.
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Via CNBC
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